Mia Alvar - In the Country - Stories

The old girl makes the best of it. For twenty-eight years she’s been adjusting to his ideas. No fair to violate a silent but long-standing contract now. Didn’t she upend her life, at twenty-two, based on a line — a single line — from one of his letters? I’ll see you when we’re both home. He’d gone to Korea during the war. She’d planned, all senior year, to move to New York, get her JD, live with her college roommate. But he’d never, in their years of growing up in close proximity, of running into one another at baptisms and weddings and wakes, mentioned the next time. And the moment he did, didn’t the old girl cancel her job, and Fordham Law, and the Upper West Side studio she was supposed to share with Mary Ann; and return to Manila?

After the wedding, didn’t she agree to skip the Pangasinan beach honeymoon they’d booked? Didn’t she follow him instead to Washington, D.C., and spend most of four months alone in a rented Arlington apartment while he did research in Langley?

And when he ran for mayor and won, didn’t she — Manila-born, Manhattan-bred — pick up and move to that country town that always made her feel half-drugged and half-asleep? Into a house that creaked and tilted like a ghost ship all the time, under the feet of villagers who entered as they pleased, roaming the halls, demanding rice or milk, the bathroom or the telephone? He wouldn’t let her strip the walls or fix the floor, which was always giving Bitbit — just learning how to crawl — splinters. It’s all some of our constituents can do to keep a roof over their heads. Can’t show them up in their own town. He didn’t want curtains at the dining room window, where townsfolk liked to watch them eat. Even seeing us fight is good. Lets them know we’re just like them. And fight they did. About the time the old girl washed her hands after shaking a peasant’s: You think Bitbit will remember a cold she had as an infant? That man’s grand children will never forget how you insulted him. Never. About the old girl driving to Manila for Bitbit’s checkups: There are plenty of good doctors here. About her visits to Clark Air Base at sunset — when the village electricity shut off, every single day, till sunrise — to dine with American friends. He won that one. She tried cracking Flaubert and Proust at home by candlelight, but country heat and boredom made her a stupid reader. For the first time in her life the old girl needed soap operas: the bold strokes, plot twists spectacular enough to pierce through her haze. Running out of radio batteries became the great crisis of her young wife- and motherhood. When the voice of the Pusong Sinugatan narrator warbled, as if he too were half-drugged, half-asleep, she thought she might go mad.

The old girl’s husband is in luck. He knows someone. A colleague at the K School, who’s run the marathon the past five years, has to travel to Berlin this April. “He says his number’s mine on the condition that I run a seven-minute mile.” The old girl’s husband laughs. “Better start calling me Tim Brown, just in case.” As if that’s all the training it takes.

Drive

In Chestnut Hill, the old girl’s husband has a recurring nightmare. He shoots upright, glazed with sweat. I dreamed I’d been hit. He grabs his chest, panting.

He never dreamed this in Manila, or in Concepcion, or anywhere they’ve lived — just here, in their master bedroom in the house on Commonwealth.

The first time, the old girl worried that it was his heart. A real-life chest pain, manifesting in his dreams as a bullet. Assassination, for the old girl’s husband, was once a sort of pet obsession. He’d bring it up even as a small-town mayor. Girls who never grew up around congressmen and senators might find this morbid and death-wishy, but the old girl remembers how her father, uncles, and grandfathers all had the same casual bravado about the topic. As if everyone who was any one had to be ready for that. Back then, she did not really think it possible for her husband to die that way. He seemed too full of himself, not serious enough. His bulletproof vest, the armored car in which he rode through the sleepy streets of Concepcion, struck her as excess, like an alarm system on a toy house.

But in Boston, it’s a drunk driver he dreams of. “Some college frat boy, coming from a party,” he says, looking terrified.

“Since when do frat boys scare you?” The old girl brings him a face towel and a glass of water. At Ateneo, he was an Upsilon Sigma Phi brother himself.

But the old girl understands. The banality of dying in a car, because of someone’s carelessness, is what terrifies her husband. Oblivion. Obscurity. That he should meet his end because somebody failed to think of him, rather than thinking too much of him. “Did they ask after me?” he wanted to know, throughout his years in prison. “Does anyone remember my name?”

“You’ve read too much Filipino history,” the old girl tells him now. A steady diet of priests on garrotes, of patriots falling to Spanish Guardia Civil rifles, has warped him. Between the two times he cheated death — sentenced to a firing squad in Manila; then furloughed to Dallas for emergency heart surgery — there’s no question which one he’d pick. “You’ve got to mix it up a bit,” she tells him. “Go look at Kit’s U.S. history book. Those heroes died of old age. Some weren’t even heroes till old age, if I remember right.”

Newlyweds

Speaking of omens, in Manila, at the wedding, they released a dove from its gold cage. It thought better of flying away, alighting on the old girl’s head instead. “ Loko mo, that’s a good sign,” said her father, as the old girl tried to shoo it off, grateful to have a veil and gloves on. “It means power, victory.”

“Just like we thought,” her mother said. “The groom’s going to be President one day.”

“It landed on the bride’s head,” a niece said. “Doesn’t that mean she ’ll be President?”

Everyone laughed, and no one harder than the old girl herself — the quiet, simple bride who’d just dropped out of law school for her MRS degree.

“So it did,” said the priest. “But she and he are one now.”

He was the old girl’s first, and only.

Something about their wedding night recalled their first meeting, at nine years old. He kept exclaiming, “Wowowie!” or “Yehey!” in bed, as if her body was the county fair, and he a child delighted to find so many wonders in one place. Thank God. What would the old girl have done with a suave or more serious lover?

She has never worried about other women. If she had to guess, she thinks there may have been flings, enough to keep up with his Congress buddies, the way men smoke cigars at baptisms or drink Johnnie Black because men do. But never a real love affair. He seems too restless, too easily distracted, to maintain a mistress. Pity the half-dressed nymph who tries to stroke his shoulders, coax him back to bed while he’s glued to Ted Koppel’s Nightline .

Campaigning

Wives she has known exact all kinds of things from their politician husbands in exchange for another year, another term, one more campaign. Cars, swimming pools, a house. A vacation, another baby, no more babies. And the holy grail of Congressbride or Senate-wife concessions: the promise that this campaign will be the last. Where is the mountaintop, and why does it keep moving? they wonder. When can we rest a little, pitch a tent, enjoy the view? Those questions, thinks the old girl, only give a brand-new Congressbride “high blood.” The sooner she can learn that, for her husband, the climb is the mountaintop, the campaign nearly as sweet as the office itself, the easier her life will be. By idea he means decision, she told a young, naïve Congressbride once. He’s not asking for your opinion but your help.